Lady Gaga's Born This Way Ball--Tacoma Dome--Monday, January 14th

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Tacoma Dome

Monday, January 14th

Lady Gaga rode onto stage at the Tacoma Dome last night on the backs of two men dressed as a horse. She would, through the course of the night, also give birth to another Lady Gaga, hatch from an egg, narrate as a hologram alien face, be cooked in a pot, don her infamous meat dress, and dance with an 11-year-old girl during her encore.

But to start things off, she alighted from her man-horse and mimed receiving oral sex from her prison-guard/alien captor.

This, ladies and gents, is what the Born This Way Ball looked like, declared by Mother Monster herself as being "Not for children." And for children it wasn't; during one section of the performance, Lady Gaga was morphed into a motorcycle and straddled by a woman who made good use of the chopper's "seat." I'm serious.

The woman is a performer. Her hologram "sang" the greater parts of "Paparazzi," and it was none to hard to tell when Gaga herself was singing (occasionally) and when a track was prerecorded (more often than not). Gaga wasn't taking it easy though, dancing around stage in stilettos, bursting in and out of her castle (oh, did I forget to mention there was a castle? There was a castle), changing outfits between songs. Breathlessly she declared Tacoma, her third show on her first major tour since Monster Ball in '09-'11, to be the best one yet.

Incredibly, you want to believe her. Lady Gaga interrupted songs to shout out to people with signs she liked. She thanked the audience, explaining that five years ago she could barely afford to go to a concert herself. "I know you saved your money to buy a ticket," she said. "I appreciate it."

Gaga even got emotional at one point, telling Tacoma that it was the first night of her Born Brave Bus tour, which had been parked outside the dome all day (Gaga herself christened it in front of a crowd with a bottle of champagne). The Born Brave Bus is used to tailgate Gaga's concerts and spread the message of self-empowerment.

Most touching of all, however, was when Gaga told the audience to take out their phones about halfway through her set. Gaga proceeded to call audience member Cory and invited him backstage after the show to share a bottle of whiskey. Cory became visibly overwhelmed, telling Gaga and the audience that he'd had a difficult childhood and that Mother Monster had taught him to accept himself. Lady Gaga then treated the audience to a second performance of Express Yourself "Born This Way," sung tenderly into her phone.

"They will not define me," was indeed the gospel of the night. Lady Gaga might not have been working hard vocally, but her enthusiasm and sincerity made up for it tenfold. Back to back "Americano" and "Poker Face" left us Little Monsters exhausted with the utter brilliance of the guilty-good performance and for the parts of the encore "Edge of Glory" that Gaga chose to sing live, her voice, costume, and lyrical honestly were not only completely unforgettable, they were inspiring.

But if you cannot admire Lady Gaga, then you must admire her fans.

Earlier in the evening, a church picketed the Dome, warning concertgoers that their souls were in danger. Incredibly, instead of discomfort, there was utter refusal to listen at all. Men flipped their wigs. Women said, "Suck my dick." Consensus was, if Lady Gaga was the path to purgatory, then we were all going to have a hell of a time.